unless you are a spammer and are scamming people.
Today someone sent me a huge horrible image of a newsletter design which I’m supposed to turn into HTML for an email newsletter.
One thing is if you register for a newsletter because you are really interested in it. A different thing is when some clever website ticks the box in some registration form and subscribes you to an annoying newsletter without you even knowing. Even worse is when you get a newsletter which you didn’t even register for by mistake. That is unsolicited email (a.k.a. spam).
That’s the kind of Newsletter I’m building (brilliant!)
So I decided to find some documentation to confirm my guesses about Email Newsletters and, of course, it had to be a Jacob Nielsen article. There’s a big pdf document (which costs $389) from the Nielsen Norman Group which tries to compile the best practices for email newsletters with some research and testing they’ve made. Plus I also found this small article which talks about some of the highlights of this findings. I quote:
“We’ve also found that users often employ their spam filters to avoid newsletters that they no longer want. Instead of un-subscribing, which users often view as too cumbersome, they simply tell their spam-blocker that the newsletter is spam.”
This, as I mentioned today to my fellow co-workers, can cause you’re domain to get blacklisted. And I tell you, that is not fun since your emails will bounce in a lot of servers. I got some email of mine which got blacklisted once. I’ve never sent email blasts or newsletters of any kind, but for some reason someone blacklisted me (probably some spammer using my email to send stuff).
“In our study, users’ most frequent complaint was about newsletters that arrived too often. And, when we let them vent, the most frequent advice our study participants had for newsletter editors was to “keep it brief.” “
Another thin I mentioned to the Sales Department where I currently work for. Unfortunately, the Newsletter they’re planning to send is one of the biggest I’ve ever seen. And trust me, I’m not exaggerating on this one, there’s going to be a lot of scrolling… oh! actually no. No one’s going to read it. ;-)
Anyhow, the article is old (2002) but it still looks pretty current. The PDF seems to be a newer edition and here’s another guess: I bet you the number of people reading this newsletters has gone down proportionally to the amount of spam we’re getting hit by now a days.
A roundabout with a stop sign… kind of defeats the whole point of having a roundabout. This is a great example to use as a comparison for bad interface design.
and you thought you made your own decisions. Psst.
Dan Ariely is a researcher in Behavioral Economics. He has this brilliant presentation which questions if we really are in charge of our own decisions.
This video is very insightful. He talks about things such as why people in certain European countries have a 95% of people of participation in organ donor programs as opposed to others having 10%. The reason is not because some countries are just selfish bastards and the others generous. Some Nordic countries, for example, have different results although their cultures are very close.
The difference was the way the government forms, where you would be offered to participate, approached the person. I won’t give it away, though. You have to watch it. ;-)
It’s coming to Toronto next month (October). To be precise it’s from the 24th of September to the 24th of October at The Bluma.
Tom Stoppard
I don’t really know much about it and I don’t want to. All I know is that Stoppard rules the school and I have to see it. I want to be surprised.
Every time I read a plot summary of some Stoppard play it never sounds attractive or interesting (except for “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”). When you read or watch the play in the theatre though, it’s a different story. I can’t really tell what it is. The originality is not on the plot but on the way the story develops, the characters interact, in the dialog… I don’t know. You’ll just have to go and find out it for yourselves. ;-)
“The music of Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, The Stones and U2 signal the dawn of a new era in Czechoslovakia in 1968 when restrictions on free speech and travel are lifted, but when the USSR invades, the struggle for freedom is ignited once again…”
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This play already opened, so here’s a review of the Canstage Production in case you’re interested.
So Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone created this crazy build-your-own social media software called Social Mania:
“The Social Product Game, features interaction design patterns, principles, anti-patterns and other situations common in product design. Teams collaborate together to build usable products under a deadline while learning about what makes successful social experiences.”
Brainstorming cards are nothing new but this goes further than that. It looks like the concepts behind it were based on stuff found in the Designing Social Interfaces Book.
I’ve shown this to a couple of persons and they all loved it. Some where in Marketing, others in product development and some others were BAs.
To top it up, Stephen Anderson gave us this 7 preview cards as a gift from his Mental Notes deck. They’ll be on sale on his site Spring 2007. This are less about product more about UX and Design. And of course I’ll have to get them. They’re just too nice looking to skip. You can pre-order to save some $.
This was a great conference. Met great people, got a ton of information and got some nice gifts :-) …
my brain is about to explode, though.
Great speakers today.
Stephen P. Anderson and Matthew Milan did great presentations. Erin Malone and Christian Crumlish showed up with this amazing Social Patterns Card Game. It’s quite difficult to play, but it’s worth it.
Stephen Anderson is the reason I attended, basically. “Wow, the guy who writes those nice articles in A List Apart is going to be there? This must be good”.
Anyway, he gave a nice presentation about how the way you approach the user can make a huge difference in the collaboration you’ll get from them. Things like the profile completeness gauge from Linkedin or the music games of iLike. They use techniques from the Gaming industry to make it a fun thing for you to fill out information which otherwise would be a daunting process. Instead of forcing you to do it, they kind of challenge you. The idea is to seduce your curiosity and drag you into playing trivia games or making you fill up information to raise your status which will then yield a reward.
It’s a hell of a lot better than presenting the user with the typical 5 or 7 pages of input fields an insurance company would t request a quote, only to take you into a final page that would say something like “We’ll let you know”.
Matthew Milan gave the most engaging presentation of all. I don’t know how he compares in terms of content but he’s definetely a kick ass presenter. It was all about innovation, which is a great topic. He used parkour as a metaphour of innovation. He was talking about using obstacles as portals to new stuff, innovative stuff. Not to flow on the path already designed for us but find a new one where there seems to be none.
He then tried to explain how to train our minds to innovate. The more you practice the better you get and according to his theory, to innovate, you need to be resoponsive in critical situations. You should be so well trained that you don’t have to think in those situations. You should just be able to fix the problem by scanning your environment and finding a solution quickly.
Critical thing for this, according to him, was not panicking in this critical situations. He compared this to the way pilots get trained to deal with this kind of dangerous situations. They can’t panic, otherwise you can’t think clearly. To find a solutions you must remain calm or know how to cope with fear.
Tomorrow I’ll post more on the card game.
Today was the first day of the IDEA conference (there was a workshop yesterday, on the 14th, but that was like an add-on or a plug-in… not a bonus because you had to pay for it).
From the program, the speakers I liked the most were Christing Wodtke and Leisa Reichelt. Everyone else had interesting information too, it’s just those two where closer to what I do.
Christina Wodtke started making analogies between Web Design / Development and Architecture which I thought was very interesting. The reason I loved this is because 5 years ago, when I lived in London (UK) I was going to Architecture Exhibitions to try and find inspiration for Web Design. I was trying to link Web with Architecture (and I’m not talking about Information Architecture). She did a better job than me, obviously.
She also said that we should go back to layout. Our designs are too boring and we need more movement. Of course, she’s not talking about crazy designer site out there but more about user interfaces for web applications. And it’s true, we’re all making square modular design boxes. Maybe we round the corners, but it’s still too square. She has a point. Standards are cool and I know that repetition makes it easy for the user but if we don’t break with the standard we don’t innovate, and that is the worst that can happen to the web or technology for that matter.
Leisa Reichelt spoke about her adventures in the Open Source world. She tried to take on the job of fixing Drupal’s massive User Experience issues, but this one wasn’t a success story. It’s a real world story and that’s what I liked about it. She hit a lot of walls when it came to re-thinking the whole experience of this CMS app. They tried to go to the root of the problem, but the problem was no one got it. Everyone tends to build from a top-level place. Designing before even thinking how to structure and make things functional.
But it happens to all of us. We get asked to make something pretty but no one gets it that when we walk into a project the problem is not generally as easy as just giving the interface a new look. I also have to deal with the problem of BA’s and Bosses creating 24,000 features for an app, which of course will never be used by 94.5% of the users and it will make their experience super annoying.
Why? Well, I just like being a minority. I’m an idiot with an HD-DVD which is useless now, of course. You can also use a cooler way to define users like me: early adopters.
Is it better, the same or worse than the iPhone? I really don’t know but there is one thing that really pisses me off about the pre. The sliding keyboard at the bottom is a bad idea for may reasons:
1- it’s small so it sucks typing in it. Since it slides vertically, not horizonatally, it’s too narrow.
2- Typing emails suck because the accelerometer can’t be used for this… well, you could, only problem is the keyboard is at the bottom of the narrow side, so if you want to type in “widescreen” mode your screwed.
3- Putting the keyboard at the bottom made the screen small.
I don’t know who had the brilliant idea but whoever it was did not do his homework. I bet you no one researched this one. It seems to be some executive decision by some guy who must have suddenly said “For me it should be a physical keyboard and it should slide down from the bottom because the Blackberry has it at the bottom” or somethign like that.
I hate when people make such decisions based on a “For me…”.
The other problems are software problems and those can be fixed.
Some software complaints here.
On the plus side:
- You can replace your battery. Don’t have to send it to Palm for that (thats why I love Apple software but not the hardware).
- You will be able to use Google Voice if you are in the US (soon coming to Canada… or so I hope).
- You can mount as a drive and just drop pictures, video, etc… and it will just pick them up. Still, that might be to convinient for you so you can use iTunes and it’s fascist ways if you like.
So what’s best? A Palm Pre or an Iphone?
Well to that I say: an HTC Hero.
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Update 4th Jan, 2010:
I have to say the Pre is starting to win me over. Android is not as good as I thought it would be. There are no apps or they are all over the place. The system looks nice but that’s it.
The Pre has a big homebrew app community. The Palm Web Os store is not that great, though. But I can’t complain because all I needed to have I have. The screen size is still an issue for me.
One other thing I’m liking is that, surprisingly enough, the Pre has a really powerful audio output. It has enough power to deal with my AudioTechnica headhphone, which an iPod can’t (and I’m guessing that includes the Touch and the iPhone).
There have been several software updates and some problems have been fixed. It runs a lot smoother now.
To start this post I want to quote Alex St. John who writes really good and funny articles in CPU Magazine . In his latest Article, “Vista Explorer 8.0″, he wrote:
“If you have to spend a lot of money marketing a free, electronically distributed upgrade to the most wiledely used browser on the Internet to get people to try it, there must be something seriously wrong with it!”
The other day we found a ridiculous bug on IE 8. When typing into input fields, these would move around 80px down each time you entered a letter. They would stop doing that when they would be blocked by another element below them. So inputo fields with no elements below them would go as far as the footer.
The HTML and CSS on these web app is not exactly clean. It was built by the back-end developers (before I came in into the company) using the NetBeans designer. The result is a ridiculous amount of nested tables. I’m sure this doesn’t help.
Only workaround we found so far is using the compatibility mode via a meta tag:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />
So that’s great, I was hoping this browser would be the “standard compliant” thing they claimed it would be… and it probably is but these kind of bugs kill all that effort they put into standars because you have to make the browser work as IE7.
